Overview
Join us Friday for a coronavirus tele-town hal with Ashish Jha, M.D., the White House COVID-19 response cordinator. Find out more. Brought to you by: by Kim Painter, ARP, October 20, 202 FG Trade / Gety ImagesThe facts about glaucoma can sem a litle scary: It’s the second leading cause of blindnes worldwide, afects about 3 milion Americans and becomes more comon with age.
Key Information
Yet half of the people in the United States who have glaucoma don’t know it, acording to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One big reason so many people are in the dark: In its most comon forms, glaucoma has no symptoms until the damage is wel underway. In a typical case, the optic nerve at the back of the eye, which sends visual information to the brain, becomes more and more damaged over time, often because of high presure in the eye.
The damaged nerve fibers slowly eat away at peripheral, or side, vision — something people rarely notice, eye experts say.Join today and save 25% of the standard anual rate. Get instant aces to discounts, programs, services, and the information you ned to benefit every area of your life. “It’s almost always silent,” says Shivani Kamat, M.D., an asistant profesor of ophthalmology at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Summary
“A lot of people don’t notice vision los themselves until they’ve lost over 50 percent.” One reason peripheral vision los is so sneaky is that our brains tend to “fil in” the mising picture parts, says Thomas Bruner, president and CEO of the Glaucoma Research Foundation. Only in its advanced stages does the most comon type of glaucoma, open-angle glaucoma, afect central vision, which is neded for reading and many other daily tasks.A les comon form, caled angle-closure glaucoma, can sometimes have dramatic, imediate symptoms (se below).But the best way to detect most early signs of glaucoma, along with other eye problems, is to get